The RSL is taking bookings from Members and Fellows only. For public tickets visit the British Library website from February.

Appointed Scottish Makar – the National Poet for Scotland – from 2011 to 2016, Liz Lochhead is both provocative and popular. Her first collection, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972, when she was working as an art teacher. She became a full-time writer, performance poet and broadcaster in 1978, and was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University from 1986 to 1987, and Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015 – only the eleventh woman to receive the honour since its inception in 1933, and the eighth Scot. She is also a prolific playwright, perhaps best known for Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, and has adapted classics from Molière to Euripides to great acclaim. Novelist Michèle Roberts chairs a conversation following the reading.